The World Cup is coming!! One of the world’s biggest sports events, matched only by the Olympics, promises to deliver a whole month of fun for all soccer fans.

Being so important, it’s pretty natural you’ll find a lot of articles, comments, blog posts and, of course, data-visualization goodies on this matter. Infographics, editorial illustrations, interactive charts and maps, all of them deliver fun and interesting way of understanding and following this great event, so, today I leave you here with a (too long?) round-up of those awesome resources – and may the best team win!

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The World Cup is organized by FIFA, the international supreme ruller of the sport – so, nothing more obvious than start this selection with a take on one of the resources from the official World Cup website.

The Trophy Tour Map shows the worldwide trip made by the most wanted object in soccer world, giving the fans a chance to take pictures with it.

If you want more control over the scores and team performances, you might want to install this cool desktop app. With this program you can view the match schedule, save the final score, show both groups and second stage table, build statistics and you can also update the results on-line.

To be in a World Cup is the ultimate career goal for every soccer player. Unfortunately, that dream is only available to some, or, even worst, it ends before it begins, caused by an injury, for example. This is the subject of the infographic made by La InformaciÃ³n (Spain), showing a hypothetical match between European and Non-European players in those conditions.

One of the aspects of the World Cup traditionally overlooked by the media is the business side. The Spanish website La Informacion put out this great visualization, with data from the UBS Investment Research, showing which companies will be making the most out of this year’s event.

Published in Wired UK (June 2010 issue), this Infographic showing a mathematical prediction for the World Cup winner was made by Section Design, with data revised by Simon Kuper and Stefan Szymanski. More on the original article here.

Dispite all the mathematical predictions, the road to the finals is always filled with surprises. This infographics from The Missing Graph presents the teams that have participated in the World Cup Finals.

From the land of the Favorites

As seen above, five time World Cup winner Brazil is always one of the favorite teams to take it all. So, it’s not really a surprise that the World Cup takes over the media around here. Some of the great works about this year’s World Cup:

Soccer is far from being popular only in Brazil. There are so many great examples of outstanding editorial designs worldwide, that would be impossible to show them all. I picked up some of the most creative and graphically appealing:

From Mexico, comes this great collection made by designer Estefan Cuanalo for the Record newspaper, with all the details about the South African stadiums where the matches will take place. You ca also look at some nice photos of the 10 arenas here.

La Prensa Grafica is one of top El Salvador publications, and their designer team made this cool infographic – which was actually just an apetizer for the second one, probably the most complete ever made . They also have a special section on their website worth visiting.

Portuguese designer MÃ¡rio Silva takes a well-design look at the Portuguese League players that will be representing their countries in the World Cup. It was made for the DiÃ¡rio EconÃ³mico newspaper.

Remembering…

Something as big and emotional as the World Cup must be filled with great moments, stories, pictures and other content. Of course, you should visit the Wikipedia article for all the facts and history, but we selected just a couple of slideshows to honor the talents involved in the past editions – and I’m not talking about the players.

Do you know who won the Golden Boot prize in 1982? Well, if you donÂ´t, this great photo-gallery featured in the Sports Illustraded WC page will give you all the answers, with great pictures from some of the best sport photographers ever!

Finnaly, for a bit of inspiration, we recomend this awesome slideshow, presented by the Telegraph newspaper (UK), with the arts of all the official posters of the past WC finals – starting with this one, from the 1930 Uruguay WC.

I’m sure there will be dozens of other great examples and resources, specially from newspapers and magazines of the countries that will be attending the World Cup. Hope you can share them with us on the comments section! And if you enjoyed the post please bookmark it on Stumble & Delicious!

About The Author

Tiago Veloso is the founder of Visual Loop, a collaborative digital environment for everything related to information design and data visualization. He lives in Brazil, and you can connect with him online on Twitter and LinkedIn.

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Fantastic posts! I should thank the person who has compiled so many amazing soccer infographics under a same roof. I’m a content writer and this site helped me a lot to jot down my contents. This is really helpful.